Betty J. Birner - Introduction to Pragmatics

Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics

The books included in this series provide comprehensive accounts of some of the most central and most rapidly developing areas of research in linguistics. Intended primarily for introductory and post-introductory students, they include exercises, discussion points, and suggestions for further reading.

This edition first published 2013

2013 Betty J. Birner

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Birner, Betty J.

Introduction to pragmatics / Betty J. Birner.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-7582-1 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4051-7583-8 (pbk.)

1. Pragmatics.

P99.4.P72B57 2013

401'.45dc23

2012005347

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Paul Klee, Rainy Day (detail), 1931 (no 150), oil and pen & brush and coloured ink on gessoed burlap. Private Collection/ Photo Christies Images/ The Bridgeman Art Library.

Cover design by Nicki Averill Design.

For Andrew and Suzanne,

my two favorite people

Preface

Introduction to Pragmatics provides a thorough grounding in pragmatic theory for graduate students and upper-level undergraduates. While ideally the reader will come to it with a basic understanding of the principles of linguistic analysis, the text assumes little or no prior study of linguistics, and hence should be appropriate for students at all levels of expertise. In length, depth, and scope, it is suitable for a semester- or quarter-long course in linguistic pragmatics.

Pragmatics is a field that is in many ways grounded in semantics. Many of its fundamental principles have been developed in reaction to semantic principles or problems of semantic analysis; for example, Grice developed his theory of implicature in order to address the semantic analysis of the natural-language equivalents of the logical operators (such as and and or ). Since its inception as a field, pragmatics has been in conversation with, and defined in opposition to, the field of semantics. The question of how pragmatics relates to, and differs from, semantics constitutes a thread running throughout this textbook. Different schools of pragmatics differ with respect to how they draw the boundary between semantics and pragmatics, a question with important ramifications for the analysis of natural language. For this reason, this question constitutes a recurring theme in this book. The text begins, therefore, with a quick review of the semantic principles and logical notation that the student will encounter in later chapters, and a discussion of the issues surrounding the demarcation of the fields of semantics and pragmatics. The text goes on to present the time-honored basic concepts of pragmatics such as implicature, speech acts, presupposition, and deixis while also including more recent developments in areas such as neo-Gricean pragmatics, Relevance theory, information structure, and Discourse Representation Theory.

The text consists of 10 chapters, a references section, a sources for examples section, and an index. More fundamental concepts are presented earlier, with later chapters building on topics introduced earlier; for instance, the chapter detailing Grices theory of implicature is followed by a chapter in which more recent approaches to implicature are discussed in light of developments over the decades since Grices initial work on the topic. Interdisciplinary strands are woven throughout the text, as the interrelationships between pragmatics and philosophy, syntax, semantics, and even more applied fields such as law and artificial intelligence are explored. Each chapter ends with exercises and discussion questions. These are designed not only to reinforce the students learning of the material in the chapter, but also to extend these concepts in new directions, for example by asking students to consider new variations on the chapters theme, examine apparent counterexamples, or apply theoretical concepts to examples from their own life.